@azog,
#7 just pick one (or 3)
#8 so say I don’t know, or don’t care to pay attention
#9 so say that… duh

Well, I had no problems with it, although I want to know where my “a few times a day” option is?! ;-)
(luckily I simply track the RSS so get the post as it happens)

I want to see 1-2 posts a day, maximum.

Doesnt confirm that anything was submitted, just bounces back to the main HAD page. I will lose sleep from the intense fear of not being eligable to cover my pasty white skin with a HAD tshirt.

@Cabel Just because HAD says that it’s not going to lower the quality of articles doesn’t mean they’re going to actually follow through. I would like the quality to increase. HAD will do what they have to for their site to be popular.

@ehrichweiss,
My time is worth more than a shirt too. But I would have done the survey if no shirt was given out. I love this site as do most people who post comments here. I think most people would think having input would be worth their time, at least if they enjoyed the content. The shirt to me really is a bonus on top of that.

Had is great, and having more comunity interaction will only be a good thing. I also think a more detailed census on your users will help you tailor your topics, ads and maybe even highlight some new editing talent.

Another idea is user sponsored projects where projects are agreed, a ringer is brought in and shares out the workload across the comunity and maybe even costs too. This site is perfect for atracting very driven and innovative people, if had can coordinate some colaberations it could provide content, community interaction, experience for those involved and maybe even some world class open source products

Since people are posting what they said in the survey, the main part:

Hack A Day used to turn down submitted links to projects because another site already linked to it. Those days, they wanted to be a site that had original (-ish) content that you didn’t just find anywhere else. Whether or not this made sense from a marketing point of view or not, it was nice from a readers point of view. I could browse HaD and not feel like I am still reading the RSS feed for Make or any other similar sites. there might be some duplication, but for the most part, it was kept to a minimum.

Move forward a few years and HaD starts posting articles it itself had posted only a year prior. If the site doesn’t care enough to do a 2 second check in it’s database, why should I care enough to come here and read it?

Stop posting 10 articles a day about any random bullshit you are typing about; i can find that anywhere online. Go back to quality projects. Go back to one post a day (with a second of minor links compiled). We all know where engadget and make and gizmodo and this old house and whatever else can be found, stop trying to be those other sites.

i agree with the HAD readers above adam Z

1) feedback to confirm receipt of my submited questionaire would have been nice

2) forest mims would make an excellent contributor if you could convice him

3) another electronics/hacking/project design god that i would like to see contribute is albert ricci bitti ( http://www.riccibitti.com )
, again if you could convince him ?

I agree with the “should have been several times a day option” comment.

I think you’ll get a lot of good info from this survey, and why are you guys having such a hard time finding your favourite three articles? Just pick three that you really like. I had about 20 come to mind and just chose three of them.

Caleb, I think you’re doing a great job, keep up the good work!

There is a very important fact that most of the people leaving comments here are missing.

HAD is in the RED. Jason stated in his post that he is losing $$$ every month on HAD. At the time of this comment, HAD has a 12,192 Alexa world ranking. This means out of every site on the web, HAD is the 12,192 most popular site in the world. HAD averages between 2 and 3.5 million unique visits a month. I am betting the reason “several times a day” was not an option is simply because as far as traffic stats are concerned, your 30 visits a day only equals 1 unique visit in the stats.

HAD sees about 4 million page views a month, that is a hell of a lot of bandwidth. HAD is most likely on a dedicated server with no bandwidth cap. Those servers are not cheap. Jason could be losing a few hundred to over $1000 a month since HAD is not self sustaining.

With a 12k Alexa rank it should not be that hard to pull down enough advertising to cover the server cost, but what about writers pay? For a site to continue to grow in popularity and compete with its competitors, it must also grow and expand its audience.

Hacking, Making, DIY is not the same as it was when HAM radios were the bleeding edge of hobbyist level electronics. It is understandably hard for old-timers to accept the changes, but with more and more youth entering the DIY market HAD must tailor some content to them also. This means more entry level articles based around platforms the youth are familiar with such as Arduino.

Demographic Stats from Alexa show that HAD’s main reader base is in the 18-24 age bracket. With 25-34 making up the next minority.

Ultimately it all boils down to this. HAD is owned by Jason, Staffed by Mike and Caleb and the other fine writers. The decision as to what HAD covers and how they expand is up to them. They might lose a few readers but in the end they will surely gain more than they will lose. This happens to every site and it is not a bad thing. Half of the negative comments in this post are from the same people who bash HAD in every post and threaten to leave in every comment they make. With 4 million unique visits a month I am sure HAD wont miss those haters or feel the tiny tiny tiny dent left from their absence.

For the record all of my stats are taken from Alexa.com and HAD’s Sitemeter page.

I filled out my survey with the information I feel is important to the owner(s), but I just have a few comments/questions:

Alexa is notorious for underreporting technical sites, because a large part of the readership is savvy enough to block ads and tracking cookies. If Alexa says HAD is 12,000, that’s pretty awesome since they’re probably significantly higher. Notice that even Alexa says they’re 6,289 in the US, which is an awesome number. And yes, that means there’s high hosting costs, but seriously, places like dreamhost give unlimited monthly bandwidth, no fine print, at quite affordable rates. I imagine that a dedicated colo server can’t be that expensive.

So I guess I ask, why does HAD need to grow/expand? Sure, try to cover the costs, that one’s pretty obvious. But do you really need more articles for that? Don’t become lifehacker. And once you’re in the black, how many writers do you ACTUALLY need? Sure, let the owner pocket some for setting up/running this (it can’t be a full time job), and throw a reasonable salary at some telecommuting writer to write up the descriptions and sort through submissions. Hell, if you guys pulled $100,000 a year in, you could pay two good writers $40k each, pay $1000/mo (too high) for dedicated hosting, and still have another $8k to pocket. You’ve got 2 million uniques a month. Let’s say you got 2 million visitors a year: pulling an equivalent value of 5 cents per person would pay for everything I outlined earlier. Or pulling $5 out of 1% of your readers in a month. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like between ads and merch, and maybe shrinking your hosting costs, there’s no reason you can’t pull that off. Unless you’re using tens of terabytes a month, which part of me doubts, and if you are, you should really figure out how to save every last bit!

“So far we’ve got, fewer posts with higher quality content.”

I think you need to know the expectations of what quality content means

does that mean well documented with instructions, does that mean the objects of the article are of the highest quality, on and on and on

people making loose cloud demands should speak up and define quality to them, otherwise you will never satisfy them

I would love to see something done with the sheeva, maybe adding a serial port for an x10 module?

@Caleb:
Sorry. I thought your tutorials were a good idea. Everybody is interested in different things though so it will be tough. I personally wasn’t interested in the DTG tut because I have a screenprinting setup. Probably a lot of people would be interested in CNC or PCB tutorials.
How about something like building a setup for bending acrylic? Maybe repurposing a plastic bag sealer or something.
Personally I think it would be cool to see stuff like a tutorial for building galvanometers on the cheap for a laser projector, (I tried that, it’s hard) or how about a tutorial for building an OBDII interface and the required software. Does that help?

@Gottabethatguy
I like that idea a lot! The ‘make a business card sized project’ comp brought out some pretty good stuff as far as i can remember, and it would certainly be a good way to get some content!
+1 on the competition/challenge idea.

I guess the Hackit articles are sort of a stab at that, but I think something more specific would be better. Seems like a tall order to pluck these ideas out the air, but give it a shot if you can!
Maybe like the hackthissite.org software challenges, but more hardware oriented

I’m starting a movement right now that to help HaD stay afloat, we should all turn off our ad blockers on hackaday.com (after all, TANSTAAFL)

Who’s in?